Line 18: POSSCON Report

Last week we took Obsidian to POSSCON. We ended up in Columbia on Tuesday to set up the booth, and get everything prepared for the next day. The next morning, we began to sit the booth and explain Obsidian to passersby. It felt slow at first, but we ended up explaining the project to tons of people. Most seemed at least interested in the idea, and they gave us good insight into where to go with it next. We had a form set up online that would allow us to send them one email after the conference, so that they could get more involved with the project if they so wished.

We also met a few good contacts at a company called Engine Yard. We met them on Tuesday night, at a meetup for sponsors and speakers. The people we met were actually two of the speakers at POSSCON, Ines Sombra and Tasha Drew, and they both seemed interested in our project as well.

Of course, we also met many other people, and were given offers of interviews and invitations to do more talks about the project. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience for a student like myself, and really showed me how welcoming the Open Source community can be.

One of the things that many people were interested in, was whether Obsidian would work with .NET. The answer was obviously that it does not currently, but there is no reason why it couldn't.

We also decided to move the project from Google Code to Github, because it seems to be a bit more popular at the moment. Plus, it provides tracking for your commits and pulls, so it is a great resource to show potential employers in the future. This means that I have a lot of work to do on the wiki again, but at least it gives me something to focus on.

For now though, Team Obsidian is taking a cool down period. We sent out a few emails tonight, thanking people for their interest, and also informing them about the project in further detail. We will be focusing on the deliverables for our Software Engineering Practicum for the next week or so, because we would still like to pass the class in the end.

Personally, I thought POSSCON was a great experience for our team. I loved every talk I got to go to, and I feel like the project generated good buzz in the community. It was a pretty fun, if slightly stressful, week.